The Oration of Burke.

The second circumstance which impressed his mind, was the commerce of the colonies: "out of all proportion, beyond the numbers of the people;" in respect to which "fiction lags after truth; invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren." Of their expanding agriculture, he said: "For some time past the Old World has been fed from the New. The scarcity which you have felt would have been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent." Of the fisheries of the colonies, especially of the whale-fishery, he spoke in words whose fame is co-extensive with the English tongue, as carried to an extent beyond that reached by "the perseverance of Holland, the activity of France, or the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise;" and this by a people "who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood."

Still more important, however, before his view than either the increasing population of the colonies, their agriculture, or their commerce, was the temper and character of the people who composed them; in which a love of freedom appeared to him the predominating feature, distinguishing the whole. The people of the colonies were descendants of Englishmen. They were, therefore, "not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas;" and so they were

fundamentally opposed, with all the force of immemorial tradition, to that taxation without representation, against which the English lovers of freedom had always fought. Their popular form of government, through provincial assemblies, contributed to foster this attachment to liberty. Their religion gave to this civil influence complete effect. "The people," he said, "are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. Their religion is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion."

If this were not strictly true in the southern colonies, where the Church of England had wider establishment, yet the spirit of liberty was there only higher and haughtier than in others, because they had a multitude of slaves; and "where this is the case," he affirmed, "in any part of the world, those who are free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. The haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible."

The education of the colonies, particularly the extent to which the study of the law was cultivated among them, contributed to their untractable spirit. It led them, not, “like more simple people, to judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance," but to "anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle."

Burke's Conclusion as to the Colonies.

The last cause of the disobedient spirit in the colonies, to which he called the attention of Parliament, was "laid deep in the natural constitution of things❞— in the remoteness of their situation; the three thousand miles of ocean forever intervening between England and them.

From all these sources, the ever-widening spirit of liberty had grown up in the colonies, now unalterable by any contrivance. "We cannot," he said, “ we cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. I think it is nearly as little in our power to change their republican religion as their free descent; and the education of the Americans is also on the same unalterable bottom with their religion;" while, if all these moral difficulties could be got over, "the ocean remains. You cannot pump this dry. And as long as it continues in its present bed, so long all the causes which weaken authority by distance will continue."

His inference from all was, that no way was open to the Government of Great Britain, but to "comply with the American spirit as necessary; or, if you please, to submit to it, as a necessary evil." "My hold of the colonies," he said, "is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties, which, though light as air, are strong as

links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government; they will cling and grapple to you; and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. It is the spirit of the English Constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member."

If I were in the least ambitious, Ladies and Gentlemen, to attract your attention to any imagined skill of my own in presenting a subject, I should not have ventured thus to recall to you the magnificent scope, the pervading power, the instinctive and harmonious splendor, of that memorable oration with which, a hundred years ago last month, the oaken rafters of St. Stephen's rang. The perfect apprehension of remote facts, as when the distant seas or summits are seen by an eye which needs no glass, through a wholly transparent air; the vast comprehension, which took into immediate vision all facts and principles related to the subject, tracing at a glance their inter-relations, as one traces the lines of city streets from a 'coigne of vantage' above the roofs, and sees the rivers on either hand which kiss the piers; the opulence of knowledge; the precision and force of argumentation; the fervor of feeling, the energy of purpose, which

The Early Spirit of the Colonies.

modulated the rhetoric to its consenting grace and majesty; the lucid and large philosophy of history; the imperial imagination, vitalizing all, and touching it with ethereal lights :-we look at these, and almost feel that eloquence died when the lips of Burke were finally closed. One's impulse is to turn to silence; and not even to offer his few small coins, more paltry than ever before the wealth of such regalia.

But I have no desire at all, except to stand with you a few moments at the point of view at which the oration of Burke has placed us, and to seek, with you, to revive in our thoughts, with a little more of fulness in detail, the origin and the growth of that essential and prophesying spirit which he from afar discerned in these colonies. For in that lies the secret of our subsequent history. It is not certain that Burke himself, looking at the matter through the partial lights of English narrative, and treating the subject for immediate practical influence upon Parliament, has fully set forth either the sources or the strength of the temper which he saw. But the complete understanding of these is most important to whomsoever would read our annals.

The remark was long ago made by Macchiavelli,* that 'States are rarely formed or re-formed save by

*It must be laid down as a general rule, that it very seldom or never happens that any government is either well-founded at first, or thoroughly reformed afterwards, except the plan be laid and conducted by one man only, who has the sole power of giving all orders, and making all laws, that are necessary for its establishment."

Political Discourses, upon Livy. Book I., chap. ix.